Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith

Author:Betty Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Published: 2020-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

19

FLO DID NO carrying-on as the time for the marriage came near. However she became more quiet and thoughtful and the bitter look on her face subtly changed to a tragic look. Once she urged Margy to wait another year. (You’re young, yet. You have your whole life before you.) But Margy didn’t want to wait. She was anxious to get started on her new life.

Flo tried to make up for all her sins of omission in those last two months. Painstakingly, she laundered the girl’s clothes and foraged far out of her neighborhood for food that was “different” and yet within her means. In a way, Margy longed for the routine meals of ground steak or eggs. They’d make supper seem less sad.

Henny took to staying home nights because Flo almost convinced him that it had been his going out in the evenings that made Margy decide to marry so young. Both parents avoided quarreling in the presence of their daughter. Only hissing whispers in the night behind their closed bedroom door indicated that they pursued the familiar tenor of their lives in private.

They had always meant to be good parents; to make their girl happy. But they had kept putting off the time to start. This is only for now, Flo thought. Someday next week, I’ll take time and make something good to eat. Next month I’ll buy a new spread for her bed. She’s been asking for a pink one for so long. Sometime I must ask her if she has any friends—she must have some—and I’ll fix up the house and ask her wouldn’t she like to have them here. Next year maybe I can let her get that new winter coat. Maybe Henny might get a raise, then I could let her keep more of her pay.

Tomorrow—next month—next year. Everything was always going to be better in the future. And suddenly the future had come. It was a brief present. Too soon it would merge into a past to be remembered. And now there were two months of the present left. She tried to do everything in that time. She couldn’t manage the new coat but she dyed Margy’s white seersucker bedspread a pale pink.

DECEMBER, THE MONTH set for the wedding, began to draw in. According to the books Margy read this should have been a happy time; full of anticipation of the ultimate consummation of love, heady with hopes for the future, plans for children, tender with thoughts of how two people who could not live without each other would have each other until life’s end.

But it wasn’t that way. It was a time of sadness and foreboding. The parents on both sides were unhappy. Both families would miss the financial help of their children. But they were used to economic deprivation and would adjust themselves to it. What saddened most was that the families had counted on marriage lifting their children up out of the environment in which they had been born and reared.

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